... pact and the victory of Blair first over Brown and then over the Left of the Party in the Clause IV Campaign. It was no surprise to find prominent LFIG networked individuals emerge in the House of Lords 1997 intake for services to politics because LFIG played a small but important role in that process of transition to what we have today. Conspiracy theory Before telling the tale, let's knock some of the conspiracy theory on the head. I am well aware of how the 'Zionist machine' works and how manipulative the Israeli Embassy can be. But even Labour Friends of Israel is no AIPAC. Nearly all the Old Labour Right in the Party were pro-Israel, pro- ...

... It quotes veteran Spotlight Bild-erberg-spotter Jim Tucker, Daniel Estulin, author of a very bad book about the group,(5 ) and Jon Ronson. It names a few recent British participants. The authors note that 'Left-wing conspir-acy theorists believe that Bilderbergers form a capitalist nucleus' (this belief makes us conspiracy theorists?) but gener-ously concede that 'there is a germ of truth in this'. But lest the reader take it too seriously, they quote Metropolitan Sera-phim, the bishop of Piraeus, as describing the Bilderbergers as 'a criminal cabal of world Zionism and its efforts to set up a cruel world dictatorship'. ...

... with the guns' are the gunmen who shot Kennedy, and the book's plot concerns a hunt for them a decade or more later. It's a good idea but it doesn't quite come off, neither as a thriller, nor as a roman a clef about the Kennedy assassination. But there is material of interest here for the student of conspiracy theories. For this, to my knowledge, is the first book which has included within it the basic thesis from The Gemstone File, an American samizdat which has been floating around the world since 1976. The Gemstone File is interesting to me because it got me started in all this muck when it appeared in the late lamented International ...

... Green Anarchist and Animal Liberation Front) case was, to their discredit, largely ignored by the mainstream media, despite having serious implications for press freedom. In November 1997, 3 editors of Green Anarchist magazine (Saxon Wood, Steve Booth and Noel Molland), were convicted and sentenced to 3 years in jail after being found guilty of conspiracy to incite 'persons unknown' to commit criminal damage, for reporting details of environmental and animal rights direct actions. Public Interest Immunity Certificates were used to suppress evidence, eg of MI5's role and intelligence-gathering methods such as surveillance and informers. The 3 were freed on bail pending appeal in March '98 after serving 4 1/2 ...

... .) The Konformist The best parapolitical/conspiratorial e-mail newsletter I have seen is Robert Sterling's The Konformist. In this there is everything from the most preposterous nonsense from the loony fringe of America (William Cooper and dumber), via an enormous range of writing on the entire spectrum of single issue subjects (murders, scandals, conspiracies, CIA, mind control, etc.), through to major, solid pieces about the New World Order, MAI, consumer boycotts and so forth. The ratio of junk to the worthwhile used to be about 70-30; but as it expands he's getting better material and the loopy stuff is diminishing. To get it ...

... , Arthur Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History, 1986. Page 62 Winter 2009/10 Lobster 58 Church. Just as most liberation theologians could not abandon the Catholic Church, the US Left cannot abandon the central theological foundation of the USA – an idea that it is socio- political salvation compared to Europe. When people write that conspiracy theories distract from greater political movement, this has the same cognitive and rhetorical function as the insistence even among radical clergy on the legitimacy of the priesthood, the mass, and the elected Papacy for the guidance of world Catholicism. Producing the cadre It is somehow fitting that the three main elite institutions for producing the cadre (Harvard, ...

... Labour party might defeat the Conservatives after 13 years in opposition. But Kinnock fell at the final fence in the election that year and by 1997, when Tony Blair's New Labour wrested power from the Tories, Oyston was in jail, serving a six year sentence for the rape and indecent assault of a young woman. The secrets of the conspiracy that destroyed Oyston's business and political career now lie in a huge archive gathered during the twenty years in which he was tormented by secret enemies, the four years in which he fought multiple rape charges and the three years he spent in prison, refusing to admit his guilt. Behind the stone walls of Claughton Hall, above the Lune ...

... 12.00 per issue of around 180 pages. Survival In The 21st Century Survival In The 21st Century first appeared in July 1985 but I didn't catch up with it until tipped off about it by Roger Sandell. Subtitled "Things Japanese and Provocative Information", Survival is a bizarre mixture of anti-Semitism, US far-right conspiracy theories (mostly reprints from Spotlight), some of the freakier bits of the US Christian (sic) right, with large doses of psychological gibberish, misinformation about AIDS and - perhaps the ultimate point - special pleading on behalf of Japanese economic expansion. And the April and June 1987 issues have large inputs from ABN. Picking a ...

... his own man but there is now good reason to take a much greater interest in the close liaison between the Vatican and the various anti-communist intelligence operations which developed in Europe under the wing of the United States and that are now coalescing into the pan-European security agency of a new state-in-the-making. Conspiracy theorists who have managed to get past the idiocies of The Da Vinci Code will always point to Catholic involvement in the spiriting away of such nasty bits of work as Pavelic of the Croatian Ustase, whose wartime activities against Serbs and Jews shocked even hardened Waffen-SS men. But the operations of a few die-hard anti- ...

... this untrained eye they look genuine; ie dull enough to be genuine. There is nothing that strikes me as startling in them, but, if indeed genuine, they confirm some of the picture of the Israeli services which has appeared in various books. At one point (March extracts) the report confirms the claims made in Anthony Pearson's Conspiracy of Silence (see below) that the Israelis had 'cooked' - ie intercepted, falsified and rebroadcast - communications between Jordan and Egypt during the 1967 war. Imam appears to be produced free by the Press and Information Department of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 27 Princes Gate, London SE7 1PX. (It is probably worth adding ...